End of the world: how would you spend your last day?

Some people are worried, some have accepted their apparent fate and others are hosting big parties.

But most people don’t seem to be taking the Mayan prediction of the end of the world – due tomorrow – seriously enough.

Perhaps they should.

On the off-chance the ancient South American civilisation was right, this reporter will certainly not miss the biggest news story of the year, decade, century – or ever.

It could be that the Mayans just ran out of stone to draw their calendar onto, but either way, they saw fit to not include anything beyond December 21, 2012.

The situation is this: tomorrow at the stroke of solstice, the Mayan “long count” calendar will read “13.0.0.0.0,” for the first time in 5125 years.

With far more significance than watching your car’s odometer click over 100,000 kilometres, the calendar event has captured the world’s imagination for the first time since Y2K.

Remember that world-ending event that didn’t happen?

The difference being this time the apocalypse has been predicted for thousands of years by an ancient culture who studied celestial bodies in the night sky for a millennia.

But they could be wrong, right?

When The Courier contacted Ballarat’s community leaders yesterday to find out how they would spend their final hours today, long pauses and laughter were the most common responses at the other end of the phone line.

They certainly didn’t appreciate the apparent doom the city faces.

For the sake of the question, they answered: spending time with family, looking at photos of the good times, throwing a party and eating a final feed of yabbies as ways they would spend their final 24 hours.

Nobody building bunkers, nobody collecting canned foods and nobody looking to rescue a large enough portion of the community to one day repopulate the planet.

One thing is for sure – if the Mayans were right, we’re all going to have egg on our faces. Or cataclysmic climate change, depending on what you believe.